Essay

By the middle of the eighteenth century both the British and the French believed that a military contest in North America was inevitable as an element of their global rivalry. Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia and other colonial governors were in constant correspondence concerning the French threat. In 1753, Dinwiddie sent Major George Washington, his newly appointed militia adjutant of the southern district of Virginia, to confront the French.

Essay

The story of the Native people who came in contact with colonial Virginians is a complex and layered story of diplomacy. We often refer to these nations as tribes today, but each had independence, political autonomy, and what we should think of as foreign policies designed to deal with other American Indian nations and with the European nations who were settling in North America.

Essay

Essay

Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Meanwhile a host of other historians have been quietly documenting the many ways in which women, slaves, natives, and small farmers—the 95 percent of Americans who were not members of the founding-era gentry—shaped the independence movement and Revolutionary War and were in turn influenced by both.

Essay

Independence from Britain was more than just a severing of ties between the United States and its former mother country. It created the chance for the United States to establish its presence in the community of nations. Thus the American Revolution not only created the United States; it was the catalyst for the invention of American diplomacy.

Essay

Philadelphia was the commercial and cultural hub of the British colonies and is indelibly linked in Americans’ minds as the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the US Constitution.

Essay

There arose in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England a model of the relation of church and state that self-consciously separated the two realms and spoke of the state as purely secular in its origins, functions, and purpose. The most influential and persuasive proponent of this radically new way of viewing the state was the English philosopher John Locke. All the important figures of the revolutionary generation, including John Otis, John and Sam Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin, were disciples of Locke.

Essay

Mercy Otis Warren fostered and modeled women’s participation in the body politic through the promulgation of virtue in the public arena. Through her writings, she had supported the American Revolution and, when the Constitution seemed to repudiate the liberties promised in the Revolution, she turned her talents to supporting the Antifederalists.

Essay

Letters between soldiers and spouses are often powerful and moving documents. Given the intensity, danger, and uncertainty of armed conflict as well as the significant changes wrought by most wars, such correspondence reveals what individuals did, felt, and experienced like few historical records can. This is the case with the letters written by Henry and Lucy Knox during the Revolutionary War.